N. Mellet

Numerical modelling for divertor design of the WEST device with a focus on plasma?wall interactions

In the perspective of operating tungsten monoblocks in WEST, the ongoing major upgrade of the Tore Supra tokamak, a dedicated modelling effort has been carried out to simulate the interaction between the edge plasma and the tungsten wall. A new transport code, SolEdge2D–EIRENE, has been developed with the ability to simulate the plasma up to the first wall. This is especially important for steady state operation, where thermal loads on all the plasma facing components, even remote from the plasma, are of interest. Moreover, main chamber tungsten sources are thought to dominate the contamination of the plasma core. We present here in particular new developments aimed at improving the description of the interface between the plasma and the wall, namely a way to treat sheath physics in a more faithful way using the output of 1D particle in cell simulations. Moreover, different models for prompt redeposition have been implemented and are compared. The latter is shown to play an important role in the balance between divertor and main chamber sources.

Modelling of the micrometric erosion pattern observed on the Tore Supra limiter tiles

Recently, the surface of carbon fibre composite tiles of the toroidal pump limiter of Tore Supra has been analysed by scanning electron and atomic force microscopies. In regions where fibres are perpendicular to the surface, a specific erosion pattern has been observed. It is constituted of a striation oriented with an angle oblique with respect to the magnetic field. The characteristic wavelength of this structure is micrometric, and similar to the fibre size. Modelling has been undertaken to reproduce this micrometric pattern. It is shown to originate from the carbon composite structure, for which it has been found by measurement using laboratory plasma that the erosion rate of the fibres is different from that of the surrounding matrix. Modelling emphasizes the effect of the impinging flux angle distributions of deuterium ions and carbon impurities that are preliminarily determined from computation of the magnetic sheath. In the case of deuterium the sheath is shown to have little effect on the particle trajectories for the simulation parameters considered here, although when impurities are included the sheath deflection is significant. Furthermore this study shows how the fibre organization in the composite influences the striation direction and points out the importance of the angular dependence of the sputtering yield.

Magnetic sheath effect on the gross and net erosion rates due to impurities

Simulations of impurity trajectories in deuterium plasmas in the vicinity of the surface are performed by taking into account the magnetic sheath in conditions relevant for ITER and WEST. We show that the magnetic sheath has a strong effect on the average impact angle of impurities in divertor conditions and that it can lead to an increase of at the gross erosion maximum for neon (Ne+4) compared to the case when only the cyclotron motion is considered. The evaluation of the net erosion has been undertaken by retaining local redeposition of tungsten (W). We investigate how it is affected by the sheath magnetic potential profile. The largest effect is however observed when an energy distribution is considered. In this case the number of particles that manage to exit the sheath is larger as it is dominated by the more energetic particles. The comparison with other work is also discussed. The application to a scenario of the WEST project is finally performed, which exhibits a moderate, however non negligible, erosion of the plasma facing components.

Assessment of the effects of scrape-off layer fluctuations on first wall sputtering with the TOKAM-2D turbulence code

Plasma material interactions on the first wall of future tokamaks such as ITER and DEMO are likely to play an important role, because of turbulent radial transport. The latter results to a large extent from the radial propagation of plasma filaments through a tenuous background. In such a situation, mean field descriptions (on which transport codes rely) become questionable. First wall sputtering is of particular interest, especially in a full W machine, since it has been shown experimentally that first wall sources control core contamination. In ITER, beryllium sources will be one of the important actors in determining the fuel retention level through codeposition. In this work, we study the effect of turbulent fluctuations on mean sputtering yields and fluxes, relying on a new version of the TOKAM-2D code which includes ion temperature fluctuations. We show that fluctuations enhance sputtering at sub-threshold impact energies, by more than an order of magnitude when fluctuation levels are of order unity.